Posts Tagged ‘Criterion Collection’

Jean Painleve was a film director, critic, theorist, and animator, yet his interests and studies also extended to mathematics, medicine, and zoology. Amazingly, all these disparate strands came together in a groundbreaking, decades-spanning artistic career. Operating under the credo: Science is fiction, Painleve forged his own unique cinematic path, creating countless short films for both the viewing public and the scientific community. Moreover, he was also one of the first filmmakers to take his camera underwater. Surreal, otherworldly documents of marine life, these films transformed sea horses, octopi, and mollusks into delicate dancers in their own floating ballets.

The three-disc Criterion DVD set Science Is Fiction: 23 Films By Jean Painleve contains a 90-minute program of assorted Painleve footage backed by a Yo La Tengo live performance, along with a three-hour documentary about Painleve and the 23 unadulterated films cited in the title. It’s those originals that are the set’s real selling-point.↓ Download movie...

The Magnificent Ambersons is based on Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel of the same name. It tells the story of the downfall of the titular upper-class family. Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello) is being courted by inventor Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) but an embarrassing incident turns Isabel away into the arms of stick-in-the-mud Wilbur Minafer, who she soon marries.

Jumping forward a number of years, the now widower Eugene comes back to town and attends a party put on by the Ambersons where he meets Isabel’s spoiled son George (Tim Holt), who is approaching adulthood and instantly falls for Eugene’s daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter). She finds George’s arrogance strangely endearing and the two begin a hesitant relationship, but all the while George becomes increasingly unhappy with the attention Eugene is giving his mother, particularly after his father dies. Indeed, Eugene and Isabel begin to rekindle their old flame, much to George’s anger.

The insolent young man does his best to intervene over the years, but, in the meantime, the Amberson family stock begins to decline whilst the Morgan family fortunes rapidly increase as the industrialisation of the town (and country) develops.↓ Download movie...

No filmmaker more deserves the lavish treatment that the Criterion Collection recently bestowed on Ingmar Bergman. Created to honor the Swedish writer-director’s centenary, “Ingmar Bergman's Cinema” pairs 39 films on 30 Blu-ray discs (regrettably, there is no DVD edition) with a nearly 250-page coffee-table book featuring a series of essays by Bergman authorities along with excerpts from archival materials and a multitude of compelling photographs.

But the box is more than a compendium of movies gathered in an attractive vessel—or at least it purports to be. Conceived as a permanent “film festival”, it divides Bergman’s singular oeuvre into vague categories like Opening and Closing Nights, Centerpieces and Double Features. Whether that enriches a film lover’s appreciation of this master’s work is debatable, but it might prove a useful starting point for those in need of some guidance. After all, Bergman directed 45 feature films (and wrote even more) before he died at age 89 in 2007.

Bergman deserves his reputation among cineastes as a meticulous prober of life’s big questions and man’s inability to come to terms with most of them.↓ Download movie...

Ten commandments, 10 films. Krzysztof Kieslowski sat for months in his small, smoke-filled room in Warsaw writing the scripts with a lawyer he’d met in the early 1980s, during the Solidarity trials. Krzysztof Piesiewicz didn’t know how to write, the director remembered, but he could talk. For hours they talked about Poland in turmoil, and together they wrote the screenplay for “No End” (1985), which told three stories of life under martial law. The government found it unsympathetic, the opposition found it compromised, and the Catholic church found it immoral. During the controversy, the collaborators ran into each other in the rain, and Piesiewicz, maybe looking for more trouble, shouted, “Someone should make a film about the Ten Commandments”.

They made 10 films, each an hour long, for Polish television. The series ran in the late 1980s, played at Venice and other film festivals, and gathered extraordinary praise. In the same year of Dekalog, Kieslowski expanded Dekalog V and VI into feature films. A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love were produced directly from these two Dekalog films respectively. Both films won wide international acclaim, with A Short Film about Killing winning two awards at Cannes.

The ten episodes are linked by a common setting, a Warsaw high-rise apartment complex where all the characters live (an early establishing shot perhaps suggests the Tower of Babel), and also by the occasional overlapping of characters from one episode into another. There is also an enigmatic, silent observer whose presence in nearly all the episodes suggests some symbolic role. Resisting the temptation to moralise or preach, in their totality the films examine the capacity of humans to deal with great challenges and contain a wealth of knowledge, thoughts, ideas, and emotions as well as being a marvellous and rare demonstration of ultimate craftsmanship in cinema.

“I can’t believe I'm here”, utters Simon Srebnik, the devastated survivor that Claude Lanzmann’s landmark Holocaust documentary Shoah first introduces us to. Brought back to the grounds of the death camp from which he miraculously escaped forty years earlier, the man is confronted with a past that clearly has faded more from the physical world than his mental one. Watching him as he combs over the area that once served as his prison and listening as he recollects the details of the camp, one gets a true appreciation of the impact that Simon’s ordeal has had on his mindset. In Shoah, a nine-and-a-half hour opus that focuses on history without using any archival footage at all, it’s the world of memory and personal experience that effectively describe to us the infamous massacres of the past. Primarily concentrating on extermination process at Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz, the film is undeniably tough going, but by looking into the hearts of the people that experienced the atrocities, it gets at the heart of the horror itself.

To best appreciate The Leopard, it is important to understand the political undercurrents of the film. Italy, circa 1859, was a fragmented collection of independent states, each controlled by different ruling interests. The Papal states resided in central Italy. Towards the south, King Ferdinand II ruled over the Bourbon states of Naples and Sicily. The Savoy States were ruled by Victor Emmanuel. Austria, after the Napoleonic Wars, had seized control of Northern Italy.

The film takes place during the heart of the Italian Risorgimento, a time of nineteenth-century social upheaval in which the Italian states rebelled against the existing aristocratic order to form a unified and democratic Italy. Burt Lancaster plays Don Fabrizio, the proud yet aging Prince of Salina, emblematic of the old society and yet fully aware that his way-of-life is slowly fading into oblivion. Garibaldi, who is attempting to unite all of Italy into one nation, has landed in Sicily, and even his adored nephew, Tancredi (Alain Delon), who he has fancied to be his successor, has joined his army. The film follows events in the lives of the Prince of Salina and his family.

With Inside Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen return to the world of humanistic dark comedy they are so good at, as evidenced by their films Fargo and Barton Fink. Focusing in on the early ’60s folk music scene in New York City’s Greenwich Village, they duo give us a fascinating, if clearly downbeat, story of a struggling folk singer negotiating his way through the burgeoning scene while simultaneously isolating himself from all of his friends along the way.

The irascible Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) has been struggling to make it in the folk music scene as a solo act ever since his partner committed suicide, but he hasn’t found much success. Living from paying gig to paying gig, sleeping on one friend’s couch to the next, and dealing with the fact that he’s gotten his friend Jim’s (Justin Timberlake) girlfriend Jean (Carey Mulligan) pregnant he finds himself increasingly isolated from his friends due to his attitude. Llewyn decides he is better off leaving town for Chicago to try to audition for a big time producer after he does a studio session for a song he feels is beneath his talents. The road trip to Chicago will be an eyeopener, bringing Llewyn face to face with the reality that, perhaps his lack of success has less to do with everyone else, and more to do with himself.

A Story of Chikamatsu centers on talented and kind-hearted apprentice scroll-maker Mohei (Kazuo Hasegawa) and Osan (Kyoko Kagawa), his wealthy but miserly boss's wife. After she turns to him rather than her husband (Eitaro Shindo) to help her get some money to repay her brother's loan, a series of unfortunate developments results in their being falsely accused of having an affair -- a crime whose proscribed punishment is humiliating and painful death by crucifixion.

One of a string of late-career masterworks made by Kenji Mizoguchi in the first half of the 1950s, A Story from Chikamatsu is an exquisitely moving tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution.

Shot in gorgeous, painterly style by master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, this delicately delivered indictment of societal oppression was heralded by Akira Kurosawa as a "great masterpiece that could only have been made by Mizoguchi".

The provocative Lulu (Melanie Griffith) picks up divorced young banker Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) in a New York diner and half-seduces, half-kidnaps him into an erotic weekend adventure. After a reckless stop at a New Jersey motel, Lulu drives Charles across several states to her hometown. There he learns that her real name is Audrey Hankel, and that the exotic "Lulu" is a veneer hiding the personal problems of a small-town girl. Outfitted in new clothes, Charles accompanies Audrey to her high school reunion, where they meet up with the unusually solicitous Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta). An impromptu double date takes on an entire new complexion when Ray and Audrey reveal their true relationship ... and that Ray is a convicted felon on a very shaky parole.

Voice actress Pepa is involved with a married man, Ivan, of whom she constantly daydreams and lusts after. In a convoluted series of events that will catch up with our protagonists later on in the film, Pepa traces his movements and discovers that he’s involved with another, quite out of her head lover, with whom he has a grown up son, Carlos. Carlos and his overbearing fiancee arrive at Pepa’s apartment with the intention of subletting the place, unawares that their potential landlord is one of his father’s many lovers. Meanwhile, Pepa’s close friend, Candela drops by the apartment in a panic, claiming she’s on the run from the police who believe she’s mixed up in some sort of terrorist plot and needs a place to hideout. Essentially through a series of missteps, improbable coincidence and misunderstandings, these characters all comedically bounce off one another until all hell proverbially breaks loose.

"Women" is a colorful, light-hearted comedy that riffs on Hitchcockian thrillers and 1950s melodrama, paying homage to Almodovar's favorite old films by laughing with them and not at them.